Kenneth Goldsmith

Patricia sez:
You see, Kenneth Goldsmith is going around telling people I don’t exist.
Absolutely not. I would never presume to speak for you nor anyone else, Patricia. I’ve never told anyone what to think about you. Instead, what I said was that without the academy, as a poet I don’t exist. I don’t see you anywhere in that equation.
Kenny

05.21.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Emily Warn

“Soft Skull is *not* over”

Updated 5:40 p.m. thanks to Shanna Compton…
Shoemaker & Hoard, soft skull press, and Counterpoint publishing houses were all purchased by Charles Winton and are being reorganized into a new publishing house known as Winton-Shoemaker. (via Shanna Compton’s blog).
Shoemaker & Hoard Announces Purchase of Soft Skull Press
Shoemaker & Hoard Announces Purchase of Counterpoint
Read Richard Eoin Nash’s post about what this means for American publishing” on Soft Skull News

05.21.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Jeffrey McDaniel

Language Watch

I saw the headline “Illegal Migrants Dissect Details of Senate Deal” in the New York Times over the weekend, and I wondered if they had a linguistic policy change, as I didn’t remember seeing that phrase “Illegal Migrant” in a headline before, so I did searches of the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Fox News websites to see which phrases they used most often. The phrases I searched were “undocumented workers”, “undocumented migrants”, “illegal migrants”, “illegal immigrants”, and “illegal aliens”.

05.21.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Jeffrey McDaniel

from the New York Times this week

This is the most whimsical thing I’ve seen in a while, and seems to capture the Czech spirit.
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I could be wrong, but I wonder if this sort of theater would be up Kenneth’s alley. It’s a site-speciifc, conceptual piece, where a German director hires an American actor to act like a farmer on an actual farm, as real farmers watch.
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If anyone will be in New York over the next couple months, this exhibit at the Grolier Club on miniature books looks off-beat and charming.

05.20.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Kenneth Goldsmith

A Tad Depressing (Redux)

Kwame,
Difference, indeed:
http://poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2007/05/kenneths_goldsmith_recent_blog.html
vs.
http://poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2007/05/kwames_dawes_recent_blog_about.html
Might be worth further discussion.
And, dear, most of my hair has already fallen out. Another curse, please. (smile)
Luv,
Kenny G

05.18.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Kwame Dawes

Ken, Yuh Draw Bad Card

Some of the larger and decidedly political work that Linton Kwesi Johnson did through his poetry involved reciting his poems at rallies and marches in the UK to protest real atrocities and abuses to real people and to argue for the changing of laws. He marched in tandem with political organizing and speech making. Those marches, those recitations, those expressions of protest through art, actually did change things. Laws were rescinded, consciousness was raised, and things have happened in the UK because of this work. Making a distinction between LKJ the poet versus the musician is misguided and limiting. That his music becomes a vehicle for his poetry is not, to my mind, an indication that poetry has failed while the music has not. For LKJ there cannot be one without the other. For me, the music and the poetry are not only engaged, but they are defining of each other. Yes, music brings people to the table, but every poet knows this even when that poet does not have a dub band backing them up. The music is in the language, too.

05.18.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Rachel Zucker

Proofs

This morning I begged the beautiful and brilliant poet Catherine Barnett (author of Into Spheres Such Perfect Holes Are Pierced) to meet me in the lobby of the elementary school (our kids go to the same school) and help me with some commas. As usual, she came through for me. I had a short list of questions, and it didn’t take much time. Occasionally Catherine lingered over a poem, reading, I could tell, for meaning, rather than simply to answer the question and said, “I’m excited for the book.” Book? All I see are words on a page, commas here and there—probably too many. The acknowledgments aren’t standardized. I detest the closed-dot subsection ornaments. The all-caps bother me—TOO EMPHATIC!—and sometimes, when italics meet an em-dash, the two lean into each other like drunken teenagers and begin to collapse. The “w” in Bell font has a little “u” shape inside, which both pleases me and embarrasses me in ways I can’t explain. Some of the poems in this manuscript were written more than seven years ago, and I’ve been revising them off-and-on since then. Now I can hardly see them except as layout and symbols, a code I invented that once stirred me with feeling. Perhaps this makes me a good editor—the ability to objectify the poems and see them as not-mine, unfamiliar? But, I am horrified by the thought that perhaps my husband feels this way when he sees my naked body. Something dear that has since lost meaning. The way a name, repeated, becomes a word, then a sound, then marks on a page.
In October, the manuscript-transformed-to-book will arrive in my mailbox. We will meet one another like lovers who have aged and changed and dressed in unfamiliar clothes.

05.18.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Kenneth Goldsmith

Kenneth Goldsmith says that utilitarian poetry fails as art

Kwame, I never said that nor do I believe it. Instead, I quoted Brian Eno as saying, “Art is everything we don’t need to do,” in which Eno was addressing the activity of making art. The results of that art, however, are another matter and, yes, it can and does affect lives. Linton Kwesi Johnson, though, I contend has much more of an influence as a politically-based musician-poet than he would if he were just a poet as music precipitates change more effectively than does poetry.
That said, I am of the mind that there are two models, both effective: the Ginsbergian and the Cageian. Ginsberg took his poetry to the streets and into the media to great effect; Cage refused the streets and, as an anarchist rejected the idea of protesting the US government on the grounds that such actions ultimately support a governmental system — any governmental system — by participating in it. Instead, his was a praxis-based resistance, one that emphasized disengagement as a model of change. He was despised in the more radical circles for this and was accused of being a bourgeois formalist.
The problem with Ginsberg (and one could add Abbie Hoffman or Bob Marley) is that they were so cooperative with the media that they were ultimately usurped and co-opted by it: “Allen Ginsberg wore khakis.” In Marley’s case — and I’m speaking as an American here (I know as a Jamaican you feel differently) — his politics lead to nothing more than another bong hit.
I felt allied with the Cageian approach for many years: I haven’t voted since my early 20s with the hopes that if I enough of us didn’t vote, the system would collapse. Wishful thinking, I know. But with the crimes of the current administration and the blood on its hands, I have no choice but to take a Ginsbergian route of engagement.
This might seem too facile, but I feel that whatever one does in their art is a political expression. Politics in art are simply unavoidable. I’m more interested in the oblique than I am in the direct, feeling that what we see in our peripheral vision is more substantial than that which we see coming head-on. At least it’s been that way for me.

05.18.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS